That's funny especially since it's mostly Republicans that believe that conspiracy crap. Look on any of those Conspiracy sites... Conservative as heck. Stop twisting things.

Any of 'those' conspiracy sites? Do you have any idea how prejudice that statement sounds? tell me more about how 'those' people who visit 'those' sites think. You sound like such an expert on the psychology of large groups of people you arbitrarily group together and slap some label on.

You may not be aware of all the nutjobs on the left, but there is plenty of nuttiness to spread across the entire political spectrum. Believing in hoaxes and BS is a human attribute that gets exhibited by conservatives and liberals alike.

That makes the alt-right attractive to degenerates like pick up artists, men's rights activists and other far right groups that want to go back to some idealised version of the 1950s.

The idyllic 1950's, a conservative's dream. There were a lot of bad things back in the 50's. Separate, and unequal treatment of minorities. For example, sit at the back of the bus, can't buy a house in a reasonably nice neighbourhood, women and minorities blacklisted from education and opportunities.

But there was good as well. Take 1954 for example. America was strong, the economy was great and the American worker could earn a living and have a great retirement without all of the socialism. It was also the year that Union membership reached its peak at 23.8%. Since then, as union power and influence has declined, so has the real adjusted income of the American worker. Good thing we've gotten rid of those evil unions who fought hard for so many American worker's rights.

The good old days had so much less government that they didn't need all of those high taxes like they have today, am I right? Yes sir, why back in 1954 the richest Americans only had to pay 87% of their income in taxes! Yes you read that correctly. The highest tax bracket was 91%, but if you read the notes in the linked documents you see that the highest effective rate on net income in 1954 was 87% of income. There were a lot more tax brackets as well, which actually worked out much more fairly. About 26 tax brackets. Anyone earning between $0 and $2,000 was taxed at 20%.

The 1950's when America was great and strong thanks to all those union workers and the high tax rates. Sounds like a conservatives dream, if you include nightmares.

There are many mirrors being ignored. Trump wiped the floor with Jeb, Cruz and Rubio before he defeated Hillary. Watching the Sunday morning talk shows this weekend gave the impression that about as many high-ups in the Republican party seem to believe that they won this Presidential election as there were people running the DNC that thought Hillary's loss was due to everything but the Democratic party.

Hillary and the Democrats were given a golden opportunity in an opponent like Trump. They ignored the progressive populism that could have brought many new voters to the polls on election day. The Dems also took for granted too many traditional voting blocks that should have been courted. Labelling a large portion of the population as deplorable, xenophobic racists didn't win Hillary any cross over votes and turned many people against her. The Democrats seem to be acting as if they did nothing wrong in the 2016 election.

The Republicans now have a golden opportunity, but they will have to accept that their message did not win the election, Trump's message did. They can make this a way to rebuild their party. Programs based on need, not race. Government that delivers for all, not just handouts for the poor and tax breaks for the rich. Equal justice for all Americans, of all races. The Republicans can transform their party and truly do something great.

They'll probably just use it to shovel trillions of dollars in defense and security funding to the biggest donors to their elections and run up the national debt like they usually do, but they have the opportunity to do something big.

If the Republicans try to run this administration like they have in the past, and they ignore the populist themes that caused their chosen ones to get beaten, just as Hillary ignored so many, they will pay a big price in the 2018 mid-term elections. The Republicans are in a great position to take advantage of the mood in America, if they can actually do some good for working, middle class Americans in the next two years and be inclusive of all of those Americans, regardless of race. They need to put aside the history of the Republican party being the party of the already rich and embrace this new opportunity.

This used to be true, but Windows 8 and 10 have changed that. The difference between Windows 7 and Windows 10 is much greater than the difference between Windows 7 and Linux Mint Cinnamon (or Mate). The move to Office 365, a subscriber service model, is also leaving many users cold. They are not moving from office 2000 or 2007 to 365. When Microsoft tries to force the choice and end support for the old versions, then Libre Office may start looking very good to many, formerly, loyal Windows fans.

I've been using Linux as my main desktop and laptop OS since 1997. Windows does not have support for the software I use. I used to be a pretty good hack at Windows back in the 3.0/3.1 days. Windows 95 was a nice upgrade. However, the cost of compilers, powerful databases, source control tools and other programming related software had me starting to use Linux more and more. I knew a lot of people back then who used to just pirate the tools they needed on Windows, but I didn't believe in stealing what I needed to work. After using Linux for a while, I knew I was done with the Windows environment. Linux is so far superior for my needs, there really is no comparison. (YRMV)

If you're happy with the Windows ecosystem, that's nice for you. I've gotten rid of a lot of aggravation in my work life by abandoning that platform decades ago.

Good catch on the water injection connection. Water injection, or water flooding, was a process developed in the late 1800's in Pennsylvania, but it did not become mainstream until the late 1920's. The purpose is usually to get the well to produce more. Injection increases well pressure and more oil can be released from a given site.

As you noted, a side effect is that pressure in the underground chambers in maintained using water injection so the risk of massive earthquakes from chamber collapse is reduced.

However, crude oil is much more viscous than water is. underground reservoirs that will hold oil for millions of years won't hold water as well. That water will more likely drain from the areas that would hold the oil. Because the water is less viscous it can flow through permeable layers of rock that oil could not. There is good evidence that this causes many, much smaller tremors. Water injection probably prevents the big collapses that lead to big deadly quakes, but seem to trade it for many smaller quakes.

There are some theories that water injection 'lubricates' fault lines leading to quakes. I think the evidence based jury is still out on that one. This article points to evidence of a few large quakes in areas of heavy drilling in an era before water injection became common. The Oklahoma evidence shows many small quakes in an area where water injection was heavily used. These both theorize the same reason for the quakes, destabilization of structures after the removal of oil. One quickly and catastrophically, the other spread out over time as water flow regulated the rate of destabilization.

However, Southern California is an area of known tectonic activity. The quakes there could have been unrelated, or only partly related to drilling.Oklahoma is pretty stable. Residents of South Eastern Missouri, along the New Madrid fault line, experience plenty of small quakes. But Oklahomans used to worry more about tornadoes than earthquakes. If the Huntington Beach type earthquakes had happened in Oklahoma back in the 1920's, before water injection, I'd say this guy should get a Nobel Prize in Geology (if it were a thing).

When you have a tablet, you can do things like punch in what defense the other team just used to provide statistical analysis of what the next best play is, or what kind of defense to run if your opponent is doing X often.

None of this should be done on the sidelines. This should be done in the team's viewing booth where weather is kept outside. A good connection can be provided for the team's cadre of wonky strategists to use up in the booth, and they can confer without the distractions on the sidelines. Much of this can also be done half a continent away at the team's headquarters. The sidelines are not the place for a data entry team and a data analysis team to do their work.

Weather is also a complication. For much of the American football season, the weather will be a major factor in trying to use touch screen based technology.

One of Belichick's complaints, in particular, was that they could not get the series of overhead photographs of the previous play down to the sidelines quick enough via the tablets. A few years ago someone would print them up in the viewing booth and a runner would take copies of the photographs and deliver them to the sidelines. Sometimes a printer would be set up near the sidelines. The older methods were faster than the tablets, probably due to poor connectivity on the field.

Besides the speed of delivery, the tablets introduced a slew of usability issues that physical photographs did not have. The photographs would be viewable in bright sun, rain and in snow. It was also easier for multiple people on the sideline to view the same set of photos at once (no darkness when looking from acute angles). It was also easier to view multiple photographs at once, as opposed to one at a time using the tablet.

The tablets are a solution to a problem that did not exist and are acting like an anchor instead of a sail.

Its not a knock against Windows in any way. Microsoft designed it that way for a specific reason. Why should MS pay good money to hire a bunch of people to write drivers for a bunch of obscure manufacturers.

Microsoft creates and publishes a stable set of API's for hardware interface, and all of those myriad of manufacturers take the cost and responsibility of producing good drivers. It makes perfect sense. Microsoft Windows has the market share. All of the hardware manufacturers that want substantial sales will support Windows.

It doesn't work exactly the same in Linux. Yes, many of the hardware manufacturers do write drivers for Linux, but they get included in Linux. The Windows drivers do not ship with Windows. Saying 'Windows supports all of this hardware' is backwards. The hardware supports Windows.

Just try it. Buy a piece of hardware and plug it in to a Windows machine.

Do not let Windows download a driver from the internet.

Do not install the driver that shipped with the hardware manually..

Then try to use the hardware. It won't work because Windows does not have the driver software needed to support the hardware unless someone installs it.

I would suggest that Windows users never buy a cheap 'Win-Printer' either. Why slowdown your computer doing all the rendering and layout computation on your main CPU when a relatively cheap completely functioning printer could do it faster?

Go buy a printer and set it up. Then connect it to your windows machine. Do not allow windows to search for a driver on the internet and do not load the drivers that shipped with the printer.

Try to configure the printer and print. Windows won't be able to. Windows does not support the hardware.

The truth is pretty much the exact opposite.The hardware manufacturer supports Windows. The hardware manufacturers write software drivers that allow Windows to use their hardware. The cost of the support is paid for by the hardware manufacturers. The distribution of the support software is paid for by the hardware manufacturers.

Microsoft supports almost no hardware, hardware supports Microsoft.

Try the same printer with any major Linux distribution. You will probably just have to plug the printer in and configure it. You won't have to download anything. Linux will already have support for the printer built in. This is true of almost all hardware for Linux. You usually don't even have to do any configuring in most hardware, just plug and play.

I don't quite follow the point you are trying to make. How much software is written for a platform, or how much hardware the OS supports seems to not be related to how open the OS is. It is kind of like relating how the vast amount of shag carpeting in the Atlanta suburbs in the 1970's is related to the juiciness of peaches shipped from Georgia. Atlanta is in Georgia, but the subjects of the statements are unrelated. Your comment just doesn't really make much sense to me.

I would also disagree with the hardware support statement. Whenever I plug a new device into a windows machine, windows goes and searches for a driver somewhere on the internet. If it doesn't find one, it asks me to load one. Windows seems to have almost no support for hardware built in and must rely completely on manufacturer's drivers. Windows isn't supporting the printer, the printer manufacturer is writing software (called drivers) that let Windows use the printer. That is hardware manufacturers supporting Windows, not Windows supporting hardware.

Linux supports a vast amount of hardware right out of the box, and almost never requires a manufacturer's driver.

It often surprises me at how little hardware Windows supports, out of the box, because the install footprint of Windows is measured in Gigabytes. Most Linux installs take up a few hundred Megabytes and yet include the drivers for tens of thousands of software devices. Just what is Microsoft doing with all that extra code, if Windows can't utilize most hardware until a driver is found, installed and configured?

In Linux, plug most hardware in and it just works. having to find a driver is a rare event. Yes I know, people are going to comment that they have a 'Lucky Panda collective # 5' (put name of obscure hardware here) touch pad that needed a driver, or that the latest version of some nVidia graphics card that only has beta-drivers for Windows is not supported. But those are the odd occurrences.

I just re-built a Windows 7 machine for my uncle a few months ago. To get his HP all-in-one printer working I ended up with a download from HP that was over 300 MB! I know the drivers for the printer/scanner/fax/copier were probably just a few thousand kB at most, and that most of the other crap was wasted on HP software that he'll never use. Just for fun I connected my Linux laptop to the printer via the wifi network and my laptop recognized the printer and I could print and scan without loading any additional software. Windows had no support without installing additional driver software. The printer was a brick to Windows without third party drivers, and yet Linux needed absolutely nothing else to use the printer, just plug and play. The printer was fully supported by Linux right out of the box.

The amount of software developed for Windows is due to the fact that Windows is the dominant OS in the PC market place today. Nothing comes close. Mac has 5%, maybe 6 or 7 % on a good day. Of course developers are going to write for the dominant platform in the marketplace, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with 'openness'. It's like juiciness and shag carpeting again, just completely unrelated.